Content - Politics Category

A Conversation on Christian Nationalism with Paul D. Miller

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 21:16:00 GMT

Paul D. Miller has a long resume of service in the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and now at Georgetown University, where he teaches international affairs. His book The Religion of American Greatness is the first of a forthcoming trilogy on political philosophy for our polarized times.

You argue there's a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Paul D. Miller: The difference is that when asked how to define America, patriotism prioritizes the principles while nationalism prioritizes the culture.

Patriotism is the love of country, of our home and of all things familiar to us. I am using love in a very specific and Christian way: to love is to desire the good of the other. I desire the good of the United States and of my fellow Americans. That means I love and accept them as they are, and I also want to see them live amidst the blessings of peace and justice. Desiring the good of the country means that I want to see us strive towards greater measures of peace and justice, to recognize our past failings and turn from them.

Nationalism does not accept the country as it is; it strives to make the country and its people into a certain kind of country and a certain kind of people, ones that conform to their preferred cultural template of "Anglo-Protestantism." You often hear a kind of odd self-hatred from nationalists: they can't love America as we actually are because we've departed so far from their vision of what we should be. They can only love America insofar as we abide by their imagination of what America used to be.

The book is both an engagement in the "grand conversation" about ideas of historical importance but also a very personal book for you, isn't it?

Miller: My first book (a version of my dissertation) was all duty, my second (on grand strategy) was ambition, my third (n just war) a calling, and this one (on Christian nationalism)—pure agony.

Writing The Religion of American Greatness presented an extraordinary intellectual challenge. I think I reorganized the chapters seven or more times, and about a third of the original text ended up on the cutting-room floor. Beyond that, this book was emotionally draining and spiritually challenging. It required me to reexamine a social and political movement that had been a part of my life. I had to stop and reexamine my heart, my motives, and my tone virtually every word I wrote.

Sometimes I wrote from a place of anger. I had to think long and hard about whether it was true righteous indignation or something more selfish and whether it was helpful to leave it in. I ended up cutting almost—almost—all of it out. I worked very hard on the tone of this book knowing that I was speaking to, and about, friends, family, and members of my community. I wanted to speak with genuine gentleness and love without sugarcoating the rebuke.

What wisdom can you offer us about how we might pull ourselves out of the spin of polarization we're in?

Miller: Turn off the TV and log out of social media. Staying abreast of the news is important, but that's best done in print. Reading rather than watching forces us to engage more critically.

Read history. Our current squabbles look smaller and less apocalyptic when you understand the depth of struggles we've been through in the past.

Do something local. If you're going to be an activist, do it in a context that forces you to meet your neighbors and your public officials face to face, to treat them like humans and listen and respond to them in real time.

If you could travel to or live in some other country, where would it be?

Miller: If I could afford it, I'd travel almost anywhere. I love taking our kids to different international restaurants to give them just the tiniest sense of how vast and varied the world is. I look forward to having eternity to experience the riches of every nation, people, tribe, and language—whose diversity reflects the infinitely broad and deep character of the God in whom all people find their unity.

A Conversation on American Democracy with Robert Tracy McKenzie

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 13:44:00 GMT

In his book We the Fallen People, historian Robert Tracy McKenzie takes an unflinching look at the nature of democracy throughout American history. In this interview, he explores the current polarized political climate, our interpretation of the Founders' theology (or better yet—their anthropology), and how our view of human nature has impacted American democratic thought. Read more in this press release.

What led to your interest in democracy and now sharing about it in the context of political polarization?

Robert Tracy McKenzie: We the Fallen People reflects my deep concern for the future of American democracy and even greater concern for the public testimony of American Christians. The political polarization that engulfs us poses a dire challenge to both. My ultimate goal is not to make a political statement but rather to help Christians think Christianly about democracy. We must think Christianly before we can act faithfully, and as we do so, both the witness of the church and the stability of our political institutions will benefit.

My ultimate goal is not to make a political statement but rather to help Christians think Christianly about democracy.

What is your main thesis in We the Fallen People?

McKenzie: That over time Americans have largely embraced democracy for the wrong reason. As C. S. Lewis argued long ago, there are really only two basic reasons to endorse majority rule: The first is because you have confidence in human nature. The second is because you don't. The former is what Lewis called the "false, romantic" understanding of democracy, and yet it's the understanding that most Americans, including most American Christians, adopted long ago.

With Lewis, I contend that a deep appreciation of human sinfulness must be the starting point of our thinking about democracy. Our failure to start there both worsens our malfunctioning political system and intensifies the polarization that so bitterly divides us. Part of the problem of American democracy, in other words, is that we Americans think too highly of ourselves. Part of the solution, I suggest, is consciously to redefine ourselves as "We the Fallen People."

What do you hope your book contributes to the present dialogue on democracy?

McKenzie: To begin with, I hope it makes us more aware of the implicit assumptions about human nature that not only inform how and why we defend democracy but also explain why we can grow so impatient with it. Our Founding Fathers assumed that no form of government could flourish that was predicated on a false understanding of human nature. We need to recover their sense of urgency in this regard.

By starting with a focus on the Founders, We the Fallen People can remind readers that there is an alternative to the path we have chosen, that it is entirely possible to champion majority rule without turning a blind eye to human sinfulness. Indeed, the Founders would persuade us that a healthy appreciation of our fallenness is essential to a flourishing democracy and vital to the long-run preservation of our liberty.

At a time when populism pervades American politics, We the Fallen People should help readers in thinking both historically and Christianly about that powerful phenomenon. I dive deeply into the presidency of our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, and draw lessons from that era for our own moment in history. Although populist rhetoric can be effective at calling attention to real injustices in our society, too often at the heart of the populist message are assertions that weaken democracy and, more critically, contradict biblical truth.

The Founders would persuade us that a healthy appreciation of our fallenness is essential to a flourishing democracy and vital to the long-run preservation of our liberty.

How do you understand the relationship between Christianity and the American Founding Fathers?

McKenzie: I think Christians have devoted too much attention to the question of whether the Founders were individuals of authentic, personal Christian faith. Caught up in the culture wars, we have been determined to prove that they were Christian men, guided by Christian principles with the goal of founding a Christian country. In We the Fallen People I turn our attention from the Founders' theology to their anthropology, from what they thought about God to what they thought about us. And their view was unequivocal: although they rarely used the term original sin, they held a view of human nature that accorded closely with that orthodox Christian doctrine, the belief that we come into the world as fallen beings who want nothing so much as to rule and please ourselves. Within a couple of generations that understanding had been all but vanished from the public square however, and American democracy ever since has rested on the more comforting, though unbiblical view, that we are individually good and collectively wise.

How has the critique of Alexis de Tocqueville contributed to our ideas about American democracy?

McKenzie: The answer, I'm afraid, is not very much, at least outside of scholarly circles. Tocqueville's Democracy in America is the most important book ever written on the topic, but it is far more often cited than read, and we're the poorer for it. His masterpiece is full of brilliant insights, but arguably the greatest is his recognition that democracy per se is morally indeterminate. It can lead to "servitude or liberty, enlightenment or barbarism." That's a sobering reminder we need to hear every day. Tocqueville also said much that we need to hear about the relation between Christianity and democracy. Writing two centuries ago, he credited American Christianity with restraining what he labeled "the tyranny of the majority," but he also warned that the church's positive influence would vanish when Christians began to ally themselves too closely to a particular political party or leader.

Where do you see the American political system in twenty years?

McKenzie: A wise historian never predicts the future, so I'll just share my fears and hopes.

My fears are twofold, and I'll state them bluntly: It's entirely conceivable that neither democracy nor Christianity will flourish in the United States in the future as they have in the past. The US is in the grips of a crisis of democracy fueled by a level of partisan polarization unequaled since the Civil War, and faith in our political institutions, and in democracy itself, is plummeting. At the same time, it seems likely that the political engagement of US Christians in the midst of this crisis of democracy—of white evangelicals, most especially—is mortgaging the long-run witness of the church in exchange for short-term influence. This is a tragic, catastrophic miscalculation. Polls indicate that the United States is undergoing head-spinning secularization, and it appears that the political witness of the church is only accelerating that trend.

It's entirely conceivable that neither democracy nor Christianity will flourish in the United States in the future as they have in the past.

My hopes, in comparison, are more modest: I believe that neither of these trends are inevitable and both can be reversed. In neither respect have we passed the point of no return. That point is looming on the horizon however, and time is running short.

Politics, Christian Discipleship, and Seeking the Common Good

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:23:00 GMT

By Jeff Crosby, Former IVP Publisher

As a publishing house, we desire to speak thoughtfully and in a balanced but bold manner into questions on the integration of faith, discipleship, and politics; on what constitutes the common good and building a just society—not only in election years, but every year. That mission is hopefully reflected in the titles we've gathered for our Books on Politics & Government page.

It's not an easy task for authors or publishers, but it's a vital exercise for a liberal democracy such as ours today.

My Political Awakening

My own political and spiritual awakenings happened at virtually the same time in the mid-1970s. Books played a significant role in both. By 1974, Watergate had forced Richard Nixon's resignation, which made way for Gerald Ford's brief ascent to the White House. Quickly on the heels of that came the nascent candidacy of a former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, in the 1976 U.S. presidential election.

The Christian publisher Word Books, then based in Waco, Texas (now a part of HarperCollinsChristian Publishing in Nashville), released an overtly supportive and lavishly illustrated campaign biography, The Search for Jimmy Carter by Tom Collins during that election year. Both it and The Miracle of Jimmy Carter by Howard Norton and Bob Slosser (Logos International, Plainfield, New Jersey) were premiered at the Christian Booksellers Association's (CBA) annual convention in the summer of 1976 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, of all places. The latter book would sell 600,000 units in its first month, become a New York Times bestseller, and signal fervent evangelical support of the former governor of Georgia.

After Carter's election, Broadman Press, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention (now known as LifeWay/B&H, also headquartered in Nashville), published a limited gift edition of his campaign autobiography Why Not the Best?, originally released in the summer of 1976 by Bantam Books as Carter appeared headed for the Democratic nomination for president. My copy of the Broadman Press book is numbered 3849 of 5000, stamped in gold foil on a back cover that is also festooned with an embossed image of the U.S. Capitol dome.

1976 was labeled by Newsweek as the "Year of the Evangelical," with Carter's victory and the eager publishing tied to it being Exhibit One of that reality. Four years later, Carter was out of office and the evangelical vote was labeled by many observers as a key difference between the 1976 and 1980 election cycles.

"Many evangelicals in the 1980 presidential election voted for Ronald W. Reagan over Jimmy Carter, even though President Carter was perceived at the time to be more evangelical in his theology and church participation than then-Governor Reagan," Francis Beckwith, a professor of philosophy and of church-state studies at Baylor University in Waco, writes in his book Politics for Christians: Statecraft as Soulcraft. "For Reagan's supporters, his policies and not his theology were decisive for them. Although at the time these evangelicals would have likely chosen Carter over Reagan to teach Sunday school, they preferred Reagan in the Oval Office because they believed that Reagan's policies best advanced the common good."

I fell short of voting age in the 1976 election, but proudly (as a relatively new believer) cast my vote in 1980 for the incumbent with the intent of keeping this explicitly evangelical leader in the White House.

It turns out, I was in the minority.

Carter lost in a landslide and returned to Plains with his wife Rosalynn and daughter Amy to pick up the pieces. I consulted more books to make sense of it all.

In a Newsweek article in 2006, reflecting on the outcomes of the 1980 election, journalist Jon Meacham wrote, "Three years after defeating Carter, President Reagan delivered a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in Orlando. The speechwriter's first draft was on the harsh side, and as Reagan edited the remarks, he added the following in his small, neat handwriting: 'The commandment given us is clear and simple—'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'."

Meacham acknowledged that the injunction is indeed clear, but it was not at all simple then, nor is it now. "How well we fulfill that injunction, believer or no, is perhaps the most consequential question of our time, or any time," Meacham wrote.

It was an interesting time to be forming notions of what constitutes Christian discipleship and faithful political engagement as a citizen. It was a divided, tense time in American society.

Much like today.

Seeking the Common Good as Christians

In his writing, Beckwith reminds us that the word "politics" is derived from the Greek word for city: "polis." As we engage ideas related to politics we are attempting "to understand 'the city,' the inner workings of a community and the way by which it governs itself over time." He goes on to state the we must concern ourselves with "what it means to be a citizen as well as whether the government under which these citizens live is just or unjust."

Do the Christian Scriptures have anything to say to us in this matter?

Both Carter and Reagan purported to believe they do, but they expressed it in very different ways in their domestic and foreign policies, and in their personal lives.

Beckwith also believes the Bible has something to say. In a chapter in Politics for Christians titled "Liberal Democracy and the Christian Citizen," he asserts there is a scriptural warrant for making the common good a standard for evaluating candidates and elected officials in office. He lists four broad areas to watch for:

The stranger is my neighbor (Luke 10:27, Luke 10:29-37)
Helping the less fortunate (Matthew 25:31-46, James 1:26-27)
The just nature of the state (Deuteronomy 24:19-22; Proverbs 31:8-9, Isaiah 58:6-10)
There is a rightly-ordered social fabric (Exodus 20:2-17)

"It seems clear that because Christians in a liberal democracy have the historically unique power to enact laws that advance the common good, they have a special obligation to take their citizenship seriously and use good judgment in voting and supporting legislation and political candidates," Beckwith writes. "This is not to say that Christians will always agree on the proper route by which the government ought to advance the common good. But there is no doubt that they have a biblical mandate to advance it."

In the fall of 1984, I was asked by a church in central Indiana to teach a course using the book The High Cost of Indifference, published that summer by Regal Books and edited by Richard Cizik, who was then a staff member of the NAE. The class was designed to consider the biblical mandate in response to a number of hot-button issues of the day, including abortion, religious liberty, nuclear war, crime, and the role of the media in public discourse, among other things. The book attempted to address the issues in an irenic, measured fashion but fostered combative responses from the church members who felt that it (and I) were not tethering to a sufficiently conservative point of view, at times.

I was thankful when, in 1992, a book by the theologian, philosopher and former Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw, Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World, was released and became a touchstone regarding civil engagement in the public square.

It was particularly Mouw's chapter "Open Hearts: The Importance of Civil Attitudes" that provided reassuring guidance for opening ourselves to other people whose stories, perspectives, and values may be different from our own.

Mouw's construct suggested that opening our hearts to civil attitudes includes:

Empathy: "To project myself into another person's feelings so that I begin to understand what it is like to have his experiences."
Curiosity: "We ought to want to become familiar with the experiences of people who are different from us simply out of a desire to understand the length and breadth of what it means to be human."
Teachability: to not just learn about another person but "to learn from them. No matter how antagonistic a perspective may be toward things that we hold previous, we should be willing at least to listen to the criticisms."

In his introduction to Athanasius's On the Incarnation, C.S. Lewis wrote, "It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." Mouw's Uncommon Decency is one of the "old books" that I re-read annually as a reminder to maintain civility in what seems to be an increasingly uncivil time.

As he concluded his integrative work on politics and Christianity, Baylor University's Francis Beckwith wisely wrote, "Like so much of life on this side of eternity, politics must be put in perspective. It is not everything, but neither is it nothing. It has its place."

Growing up in the 60s and 70s in Indiana, my family would receive each day a copy of The Indianapolis News with 2 Corinthians 3:17 imprinted under its masthead: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." It was a daily reminder of the integration of faith and care for "the polis."

Books are vehicles for promoting liberty, for shedding light on darkness. They help we, the citizens of our country, sort out issues related to this messy, fragmented, exercise we know as politics and faithful civic engagement. In a time when many of us are distracted by clickbait and popular opinion, books still have a tremendous impact. Here's to reading—widely, thoughtfully, carefully, deeply.

Jeff Crosby served as publisher of InterVarsity Press from 2016-2021 after more than twenty total years at IVP. He is now the president and CEO of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA). His writing has appeared in Conversations Journal, Books and Culture online, The Living Lutheran, Urban Faith, Crux, and many other journals and magazines. He is the editor and compiler of "Days of Grace Through the Year," a collection of meditations drawn from the writings of Lewis B. Smedes.